I rushed over to the railing and looked down in time to see her plummeting towards the ground. We were high enough to be invisible from the ground, which meant she had a long way to fall. She pointed herself straight down and was gaining speed at an alarming rate. She must have been at least a hundred meters below me when she suddenly snapped her wings open.

The sheer speed she was going at should have broken her wings, but instead they caught the wind and she leveled out in the blink of an eye and started flying nearly horizontally. She couldn’t manage anything even close to a straight line at first, but I could see the point where she realized her long tail was meant to work as a rudder. She started doing more and more complex maneuvers as her confidence grew, but with every turn she lost more and more height. She wasn’t in any danger of crashing, but she also seemed unable to climb back up.

I watched her for a few more minutes, but after that she was too far below me to see clearly, so I went back to the wheel and started to lower the Swift back towards the ground. We were still in the wilds, but far enough away from the raiders’ hideout that I felt reasonably sure I could handle anything we ran into, but it turned out that I shouldn’t really have worried. Doreen was descending far more slowly than the Swift, and before long I was looking up to see her flying above me.

She fumbled her landing, falling down to the deck after failing to switch from her horizontal posture to a standing one, but smashing into the deck did nothing to eliminate the excited flush from her cheeks.

“I can fly!” she exclaimed when I rushed over to see if she was all right after the rough landing.

“Are you out of your shattered mind?” I started to berate her, but got interrupted by a gravelly voice from the main deck.

“What’s going on here?” asked the semi familiar voice of my brother, Richard.

“Everything’s fine, Richard,” I went over to the ladder and looked down at the huge grey skinned figure. My brother had grown to a height of two and a half meters during his warping, and had a shoulder width of at least a full meter. His skin looked like it was made of hard grey stone, and his ears were huge sail-shaped affairs. A pair of sharp tusks jutting up from his jaw completed the terrifying visage of the previously very peaceful baker.

“We felt the ship going lower, and then something smashed down on our roof! Don’t tell me that nothing happened, Jack!”

Ever since I’d decided to start scavenging and try to become a Shaper, I’d been clashing with Richard whenever we were in the same room together. But even when I was screaming at him about wanting to live my own life and being strong enough to defend myself, he’d never been aggressive. He was always more disappointed and disapproving than actively fighting back.

But warping has boosted his aggression up, and he’d been confrontational since the minute I got him out of the glass tank I found him in. And most of that aggression was aimed towards Doreen, as the only conveniently available source of his current condition.

“I’m not saying that nothing happened, Richard. I’m saying that everything’s fine. I’ve been having issues with flying reptiles in this part of the wilds since I first got here, and this was really nothing new.”

Doreen was wisely staying out of sight on top of the forecastle, but I saw Marjory headed towards us from aftwards, probably to back me up if it came to a real confrontation. Fortunately, my explanation seemed to be enough to calm Richard down, and he went back into the cabin a few minutes later. Marjory waved at me and went back to Mable’s side.

“’Issues with flying reptiles?’” Doreen asked archly, still flushed from her flight.

“None of that was really a lie,” I answered as I went back to the wheel and started the Swift climbing back to her previous altitude.

“I can assure you that I am not a reptile,” she said and grabbed her small breasts, then flushed an even darker purple as she realized what she just did. “I can’t believe I just did that!”

“You just jumped ship from higher than I want to think about and this is what’s bothering you?”

“That was different! I needed to know if I could fly! This is just embarrassing!” She’d wrapped her wings around her body again, leaving just the top of her head visible.

“And you couldn’t have done that in a less suicidal way? Like maybe taking off from the deck instead?”

“I don’t think I could, actually. My wings aren’t built right to take off like that. I need the speed before I can actually fly. And doing it high enough to give me time to try again if I failed to straighten up on my first attempt was actually safer. And I have no idea why I even know that, but I just do.”

“That does make sense, I guess. You were more gliding down that flying, so lifting straight up would definitely be an issue.”

“That’s just for now, actually. My pectorals aren’t strong enough to fly properly yet, but I should be able to fly up as well as glide, eventually.”

“Still, can you please try to curb yourself from now on? You’re not used to the extra aggression from being warped yet, and it could get you hurt.”

“I can try, but I can’t promise anything. I didn’t really have time to think when I jumped. I just wanted to fly, and the next thing I know I was falling down and gaining enough speed to catch myself. I didn’t really think about it at all.”

“You might want to talk to Marjory about it. She said that dwarves are trained since they’re children to deal with those urges and keep in control.”

“I might do that later. But not until we’re a little safer. I still need to watch your back while you sail.”

I smiled at her and got the Swift back into motion towards the flying island that was our destination. We fell into a companionable silence, and I quickly found myself dropping back into the familiar trance of steering the flying Ship.